SHAHEEN modern and contemporary art is delighted to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Chicago based artist Michelle Grabner. This exhibition, which focuses on two aspects of Grabner's large and eclectic body of work, coincides with the artist's current retrospective at MOCA Cleveland.
The visually and materially diverse body of work that Michelle Grabner has produced to date derives largely from her domestic experiences and surroundings, and the vast array of roles that she has assumed and maintained over the course of her 25 years in the artworld. Grabner's efforts to balance her simultaneous and constantly expanding roles as a highly regarded artist, curator, teacher, writer, mother, and owner / director of the Suburban, the well known and widely respected gallery that she maintains in her home community of Oak Park, Illinois have imposed an ever-expanding set of limitations on her studio environment and time. These constraints have lead her to adopt a self-limiting systematic and rules based approach to painting, and pre-determined compositional strategies that, paradoxically, produce an nearly infinite variety of visual results from one work to the next.
The focal point of Grabner's exhibition at SHAHEEN are two strains of her wide-ranging artistic practice - her tondo / circular formatted silverpoints and Archimedes Spiral paintings. To make her spiral paintings, the artist works in flashe and black gesso on variously and proportionately sized tondo format canvases. The dot pattern compositions that characterize these works appear to radiate outwards in concentric rings from the center of the canvas, but actually unfold in a continuous spiral that begins from the center and proceeds outward until a dot falls off the edge of the support, at which point the painting is complete. Although the dots appear to be applied at precise intervals, the naturally varying pressure of Grabner's hand, the varying saturation / amount of paint on the brush at any given time, and her inability to maintain perfection in the spacing of the thousands of constituent dots as they spiral outward from the center produces a strong but not overwhelming optical effects.
Grabner's tondo silverpoints are realized through an age-old drawing process that was heavily employed by the Old Masters, but is almost rarely seen in contemporary art production. Effectively, silverpoint is a scratching technique, where a metal stylus is loaded up with silver and dragged across a gesso ground. Grabner's tondo silverpoints, which she executes on circular wood panels, find her starting from the edge of the support, working her way to the center along a straight edge, and then dragging the stylus back out to the perimeter along the same path. The process, which involves a constant expenditure and replenishment of the silver present on the stylus, yields rich, vibrant surfaces, as well as subtle but substantial variations in texture, tonality, color, and composition. Although silverpoint is a traditional drawing technique, Grabner treats and approaches her silverpoint works as paintings. Her domestic experience and surroundings are embodied in both her spiral paintings and silverpoints, and, both types of work conjure allusions to a number of visual and conceptual lineages and precedents within the context of post-war and contemporary art production. In addition to these two focused bodies of work, Grabner will include several examples of her new vernacular vocabulary via a selection of gingham and white relief paintings.
Over the course of her career to date, Michelle Grabner has garnered international acclaim as an artist, curator, teacher, writer and gallerist. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected in the U.S. and abroad, and resides in the permanent collections of The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and numerous other museums and institutions. Grabner is a co-curator of the upcoming Whitney Biennial ( - at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY), and is the first artist ever to curate the exhibition. A native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Grabner lives and works in Oak Park, Illinois, where she operates The Suburban, the highly and widely respected gallery that she co-founded with her husband Brad Killam, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.